Tree  Treeview  Starlink

Tree What is Treeview?

Treeview is a viewer for hierarchical structures, and knows about a number of astronomical file formats (including FITS, HDS/NDF, NDX, VOTable) amongst other things. As well as examining files in a directory tree, in most cases it can work just as well on compressed files, data from a URL, and data in (optionally compressed) zip or tar archives. Operation is very intuitive.

Briefly: a tree structure is shown in one panel of a window, and its nodes can be expanded or collapsed by clicking with a mouse. When a node is selected, additional information about it is made available in the other panel of the window; different information about the same selected node can be seen by clicking tabs. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a screenshot:

Some more screen shots are available:

Treeview is written in Java, so can be run on a variety of platforms.

Tree List of features

Treeview deals with the following generic forms of node:
Array Arrays:
These are found within FITS SIMPLE/IMAGE HDUs, Starlink HDS/NDF files and Starlink NDX structures, and represent an N-dimensional hypercube of numbers. They have the following views:
Table Tables:
These are found in TABLE/BINTABLE FITS extensions, or in VOTable files. They have the following views:
Treeview understands the structure of the following kinds of nodes and can display them hierarchically:
FITS FITS files:
NDF Starlink NDF files:
HDS Starlink HDS container files:
VOTable VOTable files:
Some VOTable screenshots are available.
XML XML documents:
Zip file Zip files:
Tar file Tar files:
NDX Starlink NDX structures:
HDX Starlink HDX containers:
Directory Directories:
File Files:
Compressed Compressed data:
Other features: The items in this list refer to the latest version.

Tree How to obtain it

If you are at a Starlink site, a not-very-recent version of Treeview should be installed as part of the standard Starlink distribution; it can probably be invoked by typing 
   /star/bin/treeview name
or just 
   treeview name
at the shell prompt.

If you are not at a Starlink site, or if you are but want to use some of the newer features you can download the latest copy from the anonymous ftp site, which contains source code and javadocs as well as the runtime jar files etc. Full installation instructions are given in the:

Installation guide.

Tree Available versions

Treeview is still undergoing development, as are some aspects of the way that Starlink distributes software, so there is an interesting range of versions available. Details of Starlink releases can be found on the Starlink Download page.

For details of which features appear in which versions, see the version history.

Tree What's next?

There is a long list of new features and enhancements I would like to make to Treeview. The following is a list in very roughly the order in which they might get done. Some are small additions, some are major projects. Items get added about as fast as they get taken off, so ones near the bottom of the list may well never reach the top. Suggestions for things not on this list, or for changes of priority of things that are on it, are very welcome. If there is anything you would like to see Treeview doing, please contact me at m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk and I will factor in such requests to my schedule.

Tree Further Information

The interested reader may wish to consult some javadoc API documentation: for the latest bleeding-edge version of Treeview. This is not however required or intended reading for users of the package.

There is not currently a formal mailing list, but if you want to be kept abreast of new features as they become available let me know and I may set one up.

Any comments, questions, requests, bugs etc, please contact me: